Wimbledon and Dailymotion ink tennis deal

The All England Lawn Tennis Club (AELTC) has signed an excusive deal with video sharing platform Dailymotion to stream live coverage from this year’s Wimbledon tournament in a bid to bolster its digital media offering to fans.

Tennis

The AELTC will use the video sharing platform to launch Live@Wimbledon, its digital media service that shows matches as well as pre-filmed content such as behind-the-scenes interviews, match previews, highlights and archive footage.

Coverage will be streamed on Wimbledon.com, the tournament’s official iPhone and Android apps, as well as on Dailymotion, whose global audience reaches 115 million monthly unique visitors according to its vice-president of international content Daniel Adams.

It will air everyday throughout the two weeks the Championship is contested to tennis fans in the UK, US, and all South American countries except Brazil. The two markets with the largest audiences for the tournament are the UK and USA, according to the AELTC, with 204 million and 123 million viewing hours respectively in 2010.

Adams says the tie-up aims to build on the platform’s sports offering, which has previously showed UEFA Europa Cup matches.

He adds: “This [partnership] will be a mix of live action, exclusive background and behind the scenes material to compliment the live broadcast. This builds on our heritage of showing exciting and exclusive live sports action to our global audience of 115 million monthly unique visitors.”

The move is part of a series of initiatives the AELTC is launching to raise the profile of the only grass court-based grand slam tournament on the ATP circuit. It signed an exclusive deal with EA Sports for the release of Grand Slam Tennis 2 in February and last year Wimbledon sponsor Sony filmed the finals in 3D for the first time ever.

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